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“... Alfred Kazin published his first and best book of literary criticism, On Native Grounds, in 1942, when he was 27 years old. It told, in highly wrought, dramatic prose, the story of American literature from what Kazin called ‘the opening struggle for realism’ in the 1890s to 1940 ...”

“... considerable critical excitement. Desperate Characters (1970) was described as ‘brilliant’ by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The Widow’s Children ‘a compelling and satisfying book’. All those endorsements, however, didn’t keep her novels from ...”

“... as rivals and enemies, coming back to them obsessively. Worst of all the New York crowd was Alfred Kazin – ‘Saul Bellow called him the conductor on the gravy train. Wherever they were passing out money, honour, position, awards – there was Kazin. I didn’t read his memoirs. Well – I did read A Walker in ...”

“... metropolitan intellectuals by events. Trilling’s story is told by other New Yorkers, including Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, who between them seem to muster a greater range of ages, backgrounds and perhaps professional experience than the Leavis contributors. The atmosphere is more wide-awake than the English colloquium on the ...”

“... In December​ 1963, the literary critic, essayist and lyrical memoirist Alfred Kazin filed a field report from an after party for a Commentary magazine symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm ...”

“... of it in old New York. For me, the city didn’t just mean Frank Sinatra and Studio 54, it meant Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag. I loved its papers, the swagger of the contributors, the New York intellectuals, with their neuroses, their arguments, their marriages, and their parties. Wilson’s disagreement with ...”

“... McCarthy. Perhaps that is why he thought it prudent to consign his text to the shadowlands.’ For Alfred Kazin it was a matter of social camouflage: Singer didn’t want his English-speaking Jewish audience to know how he had caricatured them in the novel. In his review of Shadows on the Hudson in the New York Review of Books (perhaps the last review he ...”

“... represented in Lawson-Peebles’s study, too, the confrontation posed problems of style. Only in Kazin’s wide survey are American writers at ease in their surroundings. A common response to the unexpected is a retreat to a hardened form of the familiar. Faced with landscapes that seemed to dissolve – topographies that outran the proportions of the ...”

“... precision, Mendelson traces similar private confusion and anxiety in Trilling’s coevals. Alfred Kazin marvelled in his journals at his own social and intellectual eminence – its high-water mark a lunch invitation to the White House – and sexual success. Unlike Trilling, he sublimates self-contempt into scorn for the neocons dying to break ...”

“... be meant as a riposte to previous biographers. ‘The greatest story Jack London ever wrote,’ Alfred Kazin said in On Native Grounds, ‘was the story he lived.’ But his afterlife has been uneven. Irving Stone was the first to tackle it, in Sailor on Horseback (1938), in which he more or less invented the evidence for London having killed himself ...”

“... the world accepted him. ‘I suppose I shall have to take my pannings mercifully,’ he writes to Alfred Kazin in 1944, before reassuring the burgeoning critic that he belongs ‘in our camp’. Later: ‘The reviews are incredibly vulgar, so why read them?’ One can applaud a novelist for not reading his reviews, but not reading them and obsessing ...”

“... least physical battery and certainly some come-uppance reviews) by burlesquing such mandarins as Alfred Kazin, Gore Vidal, Benjamin de Mott and – at inordinate length – George Steiner in the New Yorker (a bite at the hand which has, most famously, fed Updike): ‘An occasion to marvel once again that not since the Periclean Greeks has there been a ...”

“... attempt to elevate the proceedings by including testimony from the likes of Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, but even they tend to get dragged down into the mire. (Who else but a really professional ‘professional interviewer’ could have persuaded Diana Trilling to reveal that she has ‘often wondered what Norman was like in bed’?) The book’s ...”

“... Letters, one of his several groves of academe over the years, were Jacques Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in ...”

“... more particular animus towards Jewish literary academics, eventually extending to admirers like Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler? And why is this animus particularly pronounced when its targets are Jewish literary academics who teach in Ivy League universities like Columbia and Harvard? It is perhaps some measure of Bellow’s feelings in this matter ...”